On Thursday, President Trump signed two new executive orders relating to admissions and federal grantmaking. See summaries and links below.
Ensuring Transparency in Higher Educations Admissions
“ENSURING ACCOUNTABILITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION: Today, President Donald J. Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum directing the Secretary of Education to require higher education institutions receiving Federal financial assistance to be transparent regarding their admissions practices.
- The Memorandum directs the Secretary of Education to revamp the online presentation and data collection of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) to make it efficient, easily accessible, and intelligibly presented for parents and students.
- The Memorandum instructs the Secretary of Education to expand the scope of required reporting for institutions’ admissions data in order to provide adequate transparency as determined by the Secretary of Education.
- The Memorandum further instructs the Secretary of Education to increase accuracy checks for data submitted by institutions through IPEDS and take remedial action if institutions fail to submit data in a timely manner or submit incomplete or inaccurate data.”
Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking
Sec. 3. Strengthening Accountability for Agency Grantmaking. (a) Each agency head shall promptly designate a senior appointee who shall be responsible for creating a process to review new funding opportunity announcements and to review discretionary grants to ensure that they are consistent with agency priorities and the national interest. For the avoidance of doubt, this process shall not guarantee any particular level of review or consideration to funding applicants except as consistent with applicable law.
Sec. 4. Considerations for Discretionary Awards. (a) Senior appointees and their designees shall not ministerially ratify or routinely defer to the recommendations of others in reviewing funding opportunity announcements or discretionary awards, but shall instead use their independent judgment.
(b) In reviewing and approving funding opportunity announcements and discretionary awards, as well as in designing the review process described in section 3(a) of this order, senior appointees and their designees shall, as relevant and to the extent consistent with applicable law, apply the following principles, including in any scoring rubrics used to assess grant proposals:
(i) Discretionary awards must, where applicable, demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.
(ii) Discretionary awards shall not be used to fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate:
(A) racial preferences or other forms of racial discrimination by the grant recipient, including activities where race or intentional proxies for race will be used as a selection criterion for employment or program participation;
(B) denial by the grant recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic;
(C) illegal immigration; or
(D) any other initiatives that compromise public safety or promote anti-American values.
(iii) All else being equal, preference for discretionary awards should be given to institutions with lower indirect cost rates.
Sec. 6. Implementation and Termination Clauses. (a) Within 30 days of the date of this order, each agency head shall review the agency’s standard grant terms and conditions and submit a report to the Director detailing:
(i) whether the agency’s standard terms and conditions for discretionary awards permit termination for convenience and include the termination provisions described in 2 CFR 200.340(a), including the provisions that an award may be terminated by the agency “if an award no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities” or, in the case of a partial termination by the recipient, if the agency “determines that the remaining portion of the Federal award will not accomplish the purposes for which the Federal award was made”;
(ii) whether the agency’s standard terms and conditions for discretionary foreign assistance awards permit termination based on the national interest; and
(iii) the approximate number of active discretionary awards at the agency, as well as the approximate percentage of funding obligated under those awards that contains termination provisions allowing for termination under the circumstances described in subsection (i) of this section.